End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound

Hilda Doolittle

Jan 1979 · A New Directions book Book 476 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

They had been engaged for a period, and what began as a brief romance developed into a lifetime's friendship and collaboration in poetry. Throughout the reminiscence runs H. D's conviction that her life and Pound's had been irrevocably entwined since those early days when they had walked together in the Pennsylvania woods and he wrote for her verse after William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. Twenty-five of these poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and called "Hilda's Book," are published here for the first time as an epilogue to this important and moving document.

About the author

Hilda Doolittle was born in September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a poet and a novelist known as being a member of the poetry group avant-garde Imagists who believed in writing about what they chose. This later lead to her writings on modernism. She moved to London in 1911 where she met Ezra Pound who encouraged her writing. Her poetry was published in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work often borrowed images from classical Greek literature to evoke a particular feeling in the reader. In 1911 she sailed to Europe and met Richard Aldington - a poet whop would help her in her career and along with Pound the three poets became known as the "three original Imagists". Pound gave her the nickname H.D. Imagiste and it stuck. Some of her poetry collections are Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition. She also wrote several books such as "Hermione" and "The Gift".